How do they rank high with bad HTML

Number 2 without backlinks and seo

[adder]

Hi,
I was just browsing around and found an interesting thing. Googling for a specific keyphrase in a moderately competitive entertainment niche, you get a strange web-site in position number 2.

I looked at the source and IMO it was a mess. The W3 Validator says it has 45 errors but that is not the point. This guy has two remotely relevant H1 tags and no H2 tags plus the title and copy is also not neat.

By the way this site also has only a few backlinks and copy is not keyword rich. The only reason for being online is selling tickets for the specific venue and I believe he sells well.

Any observations, please?

[tedster]

Some relevant threads:

Does Cleaning Up Code Help Google Rankings? [webmasterworld.com]
Does Google reward "valid" HTML [webmasterworld.com]
W3C Validation and Google SEO [webmasterworld.com]

...his site also has only a few backlinks and copy is not keyword rich.

That could be a sign of other domains being 301 redirected to this domain.

[MrStitch]

"...he only has a few backlinks"

What are you using to check his back-links?

[adder]

What are you using to check his back-links?

Well, I use Google search, Alexa plus a small widget that I may not name, obviously. To sum these up, they give me quite reliable results.

Does Cleaning Up Code Help Google Rankings?

This is not the main point. Well, the main point is that the guy has made a site with a very, very poor content and he is not very strong with html. I suspect that the organisation backing the specific event helps him somehow. I don't know the details.

[jimbeetle]

Best bet for checking back links is Yahoo site explorer [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com], it makes it easy to check the backlinks' backlinks.

[Robert Charlton]

Note in Hot Topics at the top of the Google Search forum home page that there's a discussion about the limitations of the Google link operator...

Google link: operator FAQ
it's not like other search engines
[webmasterworld.com...]

Yes, most definitely use Yahoo Site Explorer. It also lists links (more or less) in their order of importance.

I suspect that the organisation backing the specific event helps him somehow.

You might even find a link from them to his site.

[ecmedia]

I have found search engines to be really forgiving when it comes to these issues, though Technorati and other similar services are brutal in this area. Plus, there is rarely a good explanation for how websites rank - if anyone knew s/he would be rich.

[adder]

Yeah, thanks for the suggestions. I must admit it's been ages since I last used Yahoo's site explorer. Eventually, it showed (pretty similar to what my widget said) that inlinks come from four different sites but what is really funny, there are about 700 inlinks in total as two of these sources are... yep, blogs! Then we have a forum (those signatures really work) and a site owned by the same no-good-html guy.

So this guy is a very active comments poster and the blog owners are too lazy to delete them.

A question arises: Is it really that Google counts 400 links from the same url as 400 votes? So, theoretically speaking, if I have a successful blog and want to promote another site, I just post 400 link containing comments to my own blog. It is that easy sometimes :)

[jimbeetle]

A question arises: Is it really that Google counts 400 links from the same url as 400 votes? So, theoretically speaking, if I have a successful blog and want to promote another site, I just post 400 link containing comments to my own blog. It is that easy sometimes :)

I assume you mean same domain, not same url. In any case, nobody except the folks inside Google really know the answer to that. There is a lot of informed speculation and I think the consensus is that it does not. When you think about it, it isn't really practical or logical to weigh each link -- say, those in a blog roll -- that appears on each of however many pages, the same. Doing so would greatly distort the link graph of the web and, in that example, blogs would have taken over the first page of the SERPs. They haven't.